I'm a complete newbie to Photoshop. I just purchased Photoshop Elements 9 because Photoshop is supposed to be the best. So far, I'm less than impressed because the content aware healing brush crashes the whole program. That's strike one.

I made the mistake over 12 years ago of not hiring a professional to take photographs of my little wedding. Unfortunately, all the pictures came out terrible. The worst problem is this grainy appearance or little specks all over the pictures. I think this is what people call noise? Can Photoshop help me fix these pictures? If yes, can someone show me a guide on how to do this? Below is a link of one of the pictures.

As far as getting rid of that noise (and yep, you're right...that's called noise ), there are several things you could try. By far, IMO, the easiest would be to try this:

1. Duplicate the layer called Background by pressing Ctrl-J (or Command-J if you're on a Mac)

2. On that duplicated layer, go to Filter>Noise>Reduce Noise. Experiment with the Strength slider (as well as the other ones) and see if that improves things (I'd give it a go, but I'm not on a machine that has PSE installed on it right now).

I'm also a bit concerned about the Spot Healing Brush crashing the program. Can you explain a bit further about what you're specifically doing at the time it crashes?

Thanks for the welcome and replying! I guess it would be helpful if I gave folks a little more detail about my computer. MY operating system is Windows XP Professional SP3. I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop w/ an Intel Pentium M processor 2.00GHz, 1.00GB of RAM. It's about 5 years old I think.

Regarding the noise, I am new to this layer thing. I tried the Reduce Noise feature, but sadly I'm sliding the Strenght all the way to 10, Preserve Details to 0% and Reduce Color Noise to 0% and all the way to 100%, but it's not doing much except bluring the dots and the details. It doesn't really remove any of the dots. I can't seem to adjust the picture once it's blured enough.

OT: What is a mask?

Quote:

Originally Posted by mrod

I'm also a bit concerned about the Spot Healing Brush crashing the program. Can you explain a bit further about what you're specifically doing at the time it crashes?

The crashing thing is apparently a known bug caused by my having a single core processor.

I was pretty bummed when I found out this feature would not work on my computer properly. The Spot Healing Brush has 3 features you can try. If I use the Proximity Match or Create Texture it works like it is supposed to. I'm not impressed with the Proximity Match, but I may need to play w/ it some more to get a better feel for what it's good for. However, if I choose the Content-Aware feature PSE 9 crashes completely. It doesn't seem to matter what size picture or how small an area I'm trying to edit, the content aware kills the program.

Next, two passes with Focus Magic to sharpen. Try to keep sharpening less than 4 pixel width. It's better to make 2 passes at 3 than 1 pass at 7. Again, I think TL InFocus is better but I have more experience with FM.

All these tools are easy to use and don't require a lot of PSE skills. Of course, you'll want to improve your PSE skills because the tools don't work on every photo.

This is a perfect example of why cheap wedding photographers are cheap. Did you notice his attempt at fake DOF? It would be laughable if these weren't your wedding photos.

I recently attended a seminar with Hanson Fong. He charges $15K for a cheap session and as much as $40K for an expensive wedding. In a few hours, Hanson showed us how to produce quality photos SOOC. Not everyone can afford Hanson but any wedding photographer should take classes on a regular basis. If a 'tog hasn't taken a class with a top pro in the past 6-12 months, avoid him.

No one has suggested a couple of things, that may help your computer problems. Get some more memory, as memory is not expensive, and get as much as your model will allow. Second, you did not say how big your hard drive is, so you may not have a lot of space for the program to use the hard drive as a scratch place to put information as it is working on the pictures. Go into preferences and change the hard disk space allowed for Ellements to use to the maximum if you have lots of hard disk space not being used.

Now that is a great improvement over all the rest. The others that were submitted still had her face out of focus, but yours had the face and everything else looking good for a picture that was that bad. I guess if you had the original scan or negative, it would be and even better shot.